Kerrey Reunites SEALs to Discuss Raid

Bracing for a newspaper account of a mission gone wrong during his service in Vietnam, former Sen. Bob Kerrey gathered five of the members of the Navy commando team he led during the war for an extraordinary five-hour meeting Friday to discuss their actions during the controversial 1969 raid.

Kerrey said in an interview Saturday that the six of them discussed in detail for the first time what they remember happening during their SEAL unit’s long-ago attack that left more than a dozen Vietnamese dead, mostly women and children.

The group issued a unanimous statement after the meeting, disputing key elements of a starkly different version of events given by Gerhard Klann, the seventh SEAL in the squad. Klann is quoted in an article in today’s New York Times Magazine as saying that the unit “rounded up women and children” and then, on Kerrey’s order, machine-gunned them.

“At the village we received fire and we returned fire,” the six men said in the statement. “One of the men in our squad remembers that we rounded up women and children and shot them at point-blank range in order to cover our extraction. That simply is not true. We know there was an enemy meeting in this village. We know this meeting had been secured by armed forces. We took fire from these forces and we returned fire. Knowing our presence had been compromised and that our lives were endangered, we withdrew while continuing to fire.”

Kerrey discussed the raid on Thanh Phong publicly for the first time in an April 18 speech at the Virginia Military Institute and gave several interviews last week on his version of events. Then came the meeting Friday.

“We stayed up until 2 o’clock in the morning and talked about something we hadn’t done in 32 years, which is the events of the 25th of February 1969,” Kerrey said.

“For each of us,” he said, that mission “was a defining and tragic moment.”

Another member of Kerrey’s SEAL team, Gene Peterson, said in an interview Saturday that the group gathered at Kerrey’s New York home because, “We wanted to get it straight, so we sat down and talked it over.”

The group had held smaller reunions before but never specifically to discuss the attack, he said.

Klann was not invited to the Friday night meeting. He did not return telephone calls Saturday.

The Times article carries both Kerrey’s and Klann’s versions of what happened. With Saturday’s statement, Kerrey adds the weight of the other five members of the team to his account, which is that the unit was shot at and then opened fire from at least 100 yards away.

Kerrey said in the interview that “we did not round up women and children and execute them.”